Every Picture tells a story - but every dish too? by Bruce Palling

“I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the Madeleine. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate and a shudder ran through my whole body…and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

We all know that old saying, “every picture tells a story” (though probably not that it was first used in an advertisement for backache kidney pills), but nowadays it seems the latest trend in haute cuisine is that every dish should tell one too. Not that stories provoked by food memories are a new phenomenon – after all, a century ago, Marcel Proust chose to use involuntary memories prompted by eating his mother’s Madeleine’s to evoke his vanished childhood, which began In Search of Lost Time, now considered perhaps the greatest Twentieth Century novel.

However, “story food”, where certain dishes are said to remind the chef of his own childhood memories, or perhaps of events relating to his or her region, is catching on with renowned chefs in Modena, London, Singapore, Marbella and even Shanghai.

Ultraviolet's Picnic Course

There have been quite a few trends in haute cuisine, starting with nouvelle cuisine in the Seventies, which lightened up classical dishes, to Modernist Cuisine, where scientific techniques created a whole range of bizarre flavours to New Nordic Cuisine, which emphasizes locally produced or foraged ingredients.

Now Story Food is emerging, happy to pick and choose from any of these former trends, but with the intention of offering a non-verbal narrative through taste sensations. The challenge for the chef is to create tastes that manage to convey the message while at the same time being pleasurable to consume.

The most prominent exemplar of this trend in London is Tom Sellers, a 26 year-old chef from Nottingham, whose Restaurant Story in Bermondsey won a Michelin star within four months of opening last year. Almost within the shadow of Tower Bridge, the unusual triangular site was, until a million pound makeover, a public lavatory. Continuing with his story theme, diners are encouraged to bring along a book of their choice and leave it behind, while each table is adorned with a novel by Charles Dickens, in honour of his local characters such as Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit.

Amuse at Story - the candle is made of beef tallow which you can mop up with the bread

How did his focus on food telling a story begin? “Food always started with a memory- I am very strong on the fact that whenever you eat something whether in a three star restaurant or a chicken shop, subconsciously your memory is relating it to a previous experience. That is where it started for me when I started to think about food and how I almost wanted to make the experience as powerful as possible.” However, the critical element is that he completely understands that food must be yummy: “I found it very important to find balance – form over function and style over substance. There is no point giving people food with an amazing story behind it if it tastes like rubbish, because you are not going to achieve anything.”

 All of the ten dishes on his tasting menu tell a story, whether it is a personal memory of the smell of burnt onions, or the background behind the ingredients. The most amusing one is a homage to Snow White and is simply called “Raw beef, apple and Perigord truffle”. The apple arrives in a bowl on a bed of ice with mist swirling around it through the application of liquid nitrogen. However, when you remove the top of the apple, there is a tangle of what look like dark weeds, but in fact are shards of black truffle with a beef tartare beneath it – an exquisite combination and anything but a poisoned apple.

Food Stories can also be more personal, like his Onion, Apple and Old Tom. This consists of pickled onions slightly charred and dipped in Old Tom, a local brand of Gin. Here, the burnt flavor was in memory of his time as a child at the Nottingham Fair, while the gin was because it is his drink of choice. “I kind of married them both together – something I loved as a child and another that I have grown to love as an adult. Some people say to me they were not sure about the onion dish because it challenged them – but I think more and more people want to be challenged with food and I am willing to take that risk.” Tom admits to having quite a rickety youth, with school not being the foremost of his interests.

Forage story - all selected by ace forager Miles Irving from Kent

So what does he think about Story Food being the next major trend? “Do I think story food is the new trend? 100% - I think molecular is done – this kind of Nordic back to your roots will continue because it works. Chefs are naturally always looking at ways to improve and empower what they do and if you instill the history behind what your are doing, whether it is a fair ground memory or related to a nursery rhyme or a fairy tale, that makes it even stronger.”

A rare shot of Massimo in mute mode

The best thing about Story Food is how accommodating it can be. Massimo Bottura, is arguably the most acclaimed chef in Italy – he was recently awarded three Michelin stars for his Osteria Francescana in Modena and last month was voted number three for the second year in a row in the Pellegrino Worlds 50 Best restaurant awards. A voluble person, his approach to food is definitely inspired by Proust and he has the quote about Proust’s Madeleine at the top of his menu.

 In Bottura’s case, his dishes are on a far more intellectual plane, where they express historical or artistic concepts. One of his most famous ones is “An eel swimming up the Po River”. This imaginary eel is a symbol for a princely family that were ousted from Ferrara and came to Modena in the Sixteenth Century. The eel manages to gather various ingredients, such as polenta from Veneto and campanine apples from Mantova plus a lacquer of Saba and Amarone – all of which end up on the plate.


Then there is his “Memory of a mortadella sandwich” which Bottura says “are memories of my past and what I remember of a mortadella sandwich, which my mother would put in my backpack when I went to school. I wanted to recreate it in my restaurant without the greasy part inside, which I managed after four years. I distilled pieces of mortadella and then with various instruments, made a foam of mortadella and through flour, a bread to accompany it. It reminds me of my youth and emotional state.”

In Shanghai, there is Ultraviolet, an extraordinary restaurant inside an old factory, where ten diners sit in an enclosed container, which is then surrounded by relevant projected images and sound for each course. Old photographs of the French countryside accompany them while they eat from a French picnic basket


or rock and roll shots of London for another one.

Ultraviolet kitchen

The meal and accompanying fine wines, come to approximately £500 per person and it is booked out months in advance.

I ate here last March and found it to be the most amusing and stimulating meal I have eaten this year - and the other surprise was that the accompanying paired wines really worked. 

The wine pairings were on another level to what you usually receive…Ygrec, Dagueneau’s Silex, Jadot’s Corton-Charlemagne, Palmer 96…

The inspired Dani Garcia in Calima's kitchen

Only this month, Dani Garcia, one of the leading young chefs in Spain, reopened his Marbella restaurant Calima, with a special menu called “Once Upon a Time”.